I'm installing across the network, using the 1.4rc_1 stage 1 and the tftpboot.img netboot images from Debian.

Anyway, I think I've just about got things tweaked in the make.conf to where the bootstrap will complete. My first attempt, using the default settings from the install doc, failed (I'm not sure how--I hypertermed into it after 8 hours of bootstrapping to find it sitting at 'ok'), and the second attempt, using settings gathered from various success stories on this forum, failed as well, but only because I apparently didn't give a large enough partition to / (I partitioned for swap, /, /boot, and /home only) and it ran out of space. I was monitoring it up until that point, and it went for a good 4 hours before running out of space, so I *think* I have the proper make.conf settings...

Anyway, like I said, it seems to be working thus far, but I haven't completed the install and will be making another run at it sometime tomorrow, so... any suggestions there? I realize -mtune=ultrasparc is redundant, but I'm gonna leave it in there anyway Also, I was under the impression that certain settings would force Gentoo to try making a 64-bit userland, which (last I heard), was a bad thing? Now, I thought the option for that was ARCH="sparc64" (vs. ARCH="sparc"), but then if that were the case the above settings wouldn't work, so...

What option forces a 64-bit userland, and is this still a bad thing?

Also, once I get the system bootstrapped and look at building a kernel, what would you all recommend as far as patches go? And, finally, though this probably should have been asked first, how well do non-ext2 filesystems work on Sparc boxes? I've read that XFS is a bad idea, and, to a lesser extent, resierfs as well, but how about ext3?

I was under the impression that certain settings would force Gentoo to try making a 64-bit userland, which (last I heard), was a bad thing? Now, I thought the option for that was ARCH="sparc64" (vs. ARCH="sparc"), but then if that were the case the above settings wouldn't work, so...

I thought I put ARCH=sparch64 in the docs, nothing in my docs will force 64-bit userland, it is not yet supported. I am able to compile src into 64-bit (with gcc as cross-compiler, binutils generating 64-bit bins and a 64-bit glibc), I could get both dyn and static bins, but I still have problem to get 32 and 64 dynamic linker to work happily together.

64 bit userland has only advantages when you use a lot big numbers (bigger then 2^32) or you need more then 4GB of memory per process, otherwise it is slower then 32-bit counterparts on sparcs.

As for the fs, I am using ext2 for /boot (silo can't boot reiserfs) and the rest resirfs